News from The Barnet Society

Birt Acres, a key figure in the invention of British movies, lived and worked in Chipping Barnet. His 1897 short Band Marching down a Street is one of very few to survive from the earliest days of film. Local history investigation has convinced me that it was shot in Stapylton Road.

Barnet might have lost its football club, but another of the town’s sporting traditions is still making history: Barnet Elizabethans Rugby Football Club is about to start a year of commemorative events to celebrate its centenary.

Scenes from the battles of St Albans (1461) and Barnet (1471) – two of the engagements in the Wars of the Roses – are to be re-created as part of the Barnet Medieval Festival to be held over the weekend of June 9 and 10 at the Byng Road playing fields.

Roads running between High Barnet and New Barnet merge together almost seamlessly today, but in the 1930s, when farmland still separated the two towns, the footpath up to the shops in the High Street was through fields filled with cows.

The Barnet Press, once one of the most respected weekly newspapers in North London, has ceased publication after steadily losing circulation and struggling financially. Established in 1859 by the Cowing family, the Barnet Press was originally published and printed at its premises in Barnet High Street.

An unrivalled display of images of Richard III, from his role in the 1471 Battle of Barnet until his death in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth Field, has been amassed by photographer Geoffrey Wheeler.

Dr Alice Roberts presents the BBC4 program 'Digging for Britain' Two promising pointers towards locating the precise site of the 1471 Battle of Barnet were examined in the final television programme of the current archaeological series, Digging for Britain on BBC4.

After years of uncertainty about its future, Barnet Museum is finally being promised security of tenure – a 125-year lease at a peppercorn rent. Barnet Council’s asset, regeneration and growth committee agreed the move at its most recent meeting.

A unique, almost-forgotten tape recording gives a fascinating eye-witness account of every-day life in Barnet at the turn of the century before last, when horse-drawn coaches, traps and wagons filled the High Street, long before the arrival of the motor car.

After an extensive search with metal detectors a highly-experienced team of military archaeologists has unearthed a host of medieval items that might be linked to the 1471 Battle of Barnet.

A survey to assess the size and shape of the lost hamlet of Kitts End could assist the ongoing archaeological investigation to determine the precise site of the Battle of Barnet of 1471.

A series of test pits are to be dug on land inside Wrotham Park as part of an investigation to locate the possible site a chapel that was erected to commemorate men killed in the Battle of Barnet of 1471.

 Visitors queued up for opening time at Barnet’s historic well house – not for a drink, but a rare chance to descend the twelve steps to see the tanks of the old physic well.

Barnet’s historic physic well, visited by Samuel Pepys, will be open to the public on Saturday 19 March offering a rare chance to walk down the brick-built stairway to see the tanks filled by spring water.

A question mark hanging over the future ownership of Barnet’s many historic almshouses has finally been resolved after the government gave an assurance they would not be included in the extension of the right-to-buy scheme for housing tenants.

Farmland to the west of Wrotham Park, alongside Kitts End Lane and the St Albans Road, is emerging as a likely site of the Battle of Barnet.

It is not well enough known that British cinema was born in Chipping Barnet 120 years ago.  Moving images were then as revolutionary as virtual reality seems now.

A medieval silver farthing that might have been in use at the time of the Battle of Barnet of 1471 is the most dramatic find discovered so far during searches with metal detectors on farm-land beside Kitts End Lane.

When workmen removed the last wooden panels covering up tiling on the walls of 89 High Street, Barnet, they were able to solve the mystery surrounding the painting of a dairy maid.

 Two Victorian measuring jugs from a former public house in High Barnet have turned up mysteriously in the archives of St Peter’s Church at Formby on Merseyside.